Content-based instruction, task-based language teaching, and game-mediated learning are three pedagogical approaches that are perceived as effective in second and foreign language education. These approaches share common ground in a sociocultural and functional view of language learning and popularity as engaging classroom strategies in K-12 contexts. However, challenges may exist in attaining content-integrated language learning goals, designing engaging and efficient language learning tasks, or implementing game-mediated activities in classroom settings. Prior research has suggested an enhanced result in facilitating language learning as well as promoting student participation when combining some of these existing approaches. What is missing is an attempt to blend all three approaches which may lead to a synergistic way of utilizing task-based, game-mediated activities to help achieve the goals of content-integrated language learning. To address this gap in current literature and field practice, I proposed a game-mediated dual learning instructional model that aims to conceptually and practically discuss various ways of blending these aforementioned approaches. In addition, I adopted two analytical frameworks—a close analysis of language-related episodes and a three-step multimodal analysis of learners’ participation—to provide empirical evidence for participants’ language production and multimodal participation during a game-mediated project. This qualitative-driven study took place in a physics class in an independent high school in the northeastern U.S. from January to March 2022. Data sources for the project included (1) audio and video recorded data, and (2) observational data such as student-oriented notes taken during the stay at the research site. The findings of this project illustrate the diverse opportunities for language learning through participating in collaborative, game-mediated, and task-based activities. The findings also suggest that participants adopted multimodal ways of communication when engaging in these activities. This project contributes to the literature on game-mediated second and foreign language education by adopting an interdisciplinary approach to propose a new way of integrating several pedagogical approaches, while also providing an empirical account of this instructional model.

Digital media is becoming increasingly important to learning in today’s changing times. At the same time, digital technologies and related digital skills are unevenly distributed. Further, deficit-based notions of this digital divide define the public’s educational paradigm. Against this backdrop, I forayed into the social reality of one rural Americana to examine digital learning in the wild. The larger purpose of this dissertation was to spatialize understandings of rural life and pervasive social ills therein, in order to rethink digital equity, such that we dismantle deficit thinking, problematize new ruralism, and re-imagine more just rural geographies. Under a Thirdspace understanding of space as dynamic, relational, and agentive (Soja, 1996), I examined how digital learning is caught up spatially to position the rural struggle over geography amid the ‘Right to the City’ rhetoric (Lefebvre, 1968). In response to this limiting and urban-centric rhetoric, I contest digital inequity as a spatial issue of justice in rural areas. After exploring how digital learning opportunities are distributed at state and local levels, I geo-ethnographically explored digital use to story how families across socio-economic spaces were utilizing digital tools. Last, because ineffective and deficit-based models of understanding erupt from blaming the oppressed for their own self-made oppression, or framing problems (e.g., digital inequity) as solely human-centered, I drew in posthumanist Latourian (2005) social cartographies of Thirdspace. From this, I re-imagined educational equity within rural space to recast digital equity not in terms of the “haves and have nots” but as an account of mutually transformative socio-technical agency. Last, I pay the price of criticism by suggesting possible actions and solutions to the social ills denounced throughout this dissertation.